Hiep Thi Le

Hiep Thi Le (1969-2017) was a Vietnamese-American film actress, mostly known for her portrayal of philanthropist and author Le Ly Hayslip in the Oliver Stone film, Heaven and Earth (1993), and restaurateur.

Born on November 30, 1969, Hiep Thi Le was one of five children in a family from Da Nang, Central Vietnam.  While just weeks shy of her tenth birthday, she and a younger sister courageously boarded a fishing boat along with 60 other refugees and sailed to Hong Kong to reunite with their father who had successfully defected from communist Vietnam a year earlier.  After months spent at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, her entire family would reunite and resettle in Oakland, California.

After graduating from Oakland High School, Hiep Thi Le went onto the University of California, Davis as a physiology major.  During her senior year in college, she along with several friends went on an open casting call held at San Jose State University for an upcoming Oliver Stone film based on the Vietnam War.  Out of 16,000 Vietnamese-American delegates, Hiep Thi Le, without any prior acting experience, ended up being chosen for the coveted role of the lead character in, Heaven and Earth (1993), a biopic film based on the two bestselling autobiographical novels written by philanthropist and Vietnamese-American philanthropist Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Doubleday, 1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace (Doubleday, 1993).  Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Joan Chen, Debbie Reynolds and Dustin Nguyen, Heaven and Earth would be the third in Oliver Stone's trilogy of Vietnam War films after Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).  Unlike Oliver Stone's two prior critical and commercial successes about the Vietnam War, Heaven and Earth was not honored with any major accolade in the film industry and was a financial disaster.  However, Hiep Thi Le's performance had won her many praises from film critics which launched an unexpected acting career in films for the young UC Davis graduate.

Following Heaven and Earth, Hiep Thi Le went onto star in Bugis Street, a Hong Kong-produced film about Singaporean transvestite prostitutes, alongside actors Michael Lam and Wai-Leung.  Among her other film acting credits include Dead Men Can't Dance (1997), Cruel Intentions (1999), Bastards (1999), Shark in a Bottle (2000) with Danny Nucci, Green Dragon (2001) which was directed by Timothy Linh Bui and starred Patrick Swayze, Forest Whitaker, Don Duong, Kathleen Luong and Kieu Chinh, the Singaporean-produced film Return to Pontianak (2001), National Security (2003), Julia (2007) and Touch (2011).

In 2002, Hiep Thi Le embarked on a new career as a restaurateur opening up Le Cellier, a French-Vietnamese bistro located on the border of Venice Beach and Marina Del Rey in Southern California.  In 2012, the restaurant name had been changed to China Beach Bistro.  On December 19, 2017, Hiep Thi Le died of complications from stomach cancer at the age of 48.  She is survived by her parents, 6 siblings, husband and 2 children.  Her memoir, Daughter of the Sea:  My Voyage to Freedom and Womanhood, has yet to be published.

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China Beach Bistro